1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a disc, and, more particularly, to an information recording medium, a recording/reproducing method, and a recording/reproducing apparatus for re-initializing the medium.
2. Description of the Related Art
The number of defects in a re-writable information storage medium increases due to scratches, fingerprints, or dust existing on the medium during use of the medium. Defect blocks occurring while using the medium are managed by being registered as defect information, and a host or a drive system tries not to allocate data to the defect blocks, but to record data in non-defect blocks. As such, when the medium is continuously used, the number of such defect blocks will increase. Accordingly, a user will desire to re-initialize the medium.
In this case, the defect blocks registered in the defect information after the user has removed the fingerprints or dust from the surface of the medium can be determined to be satisfactory non-defect blocks by disc verification after recording data. As such, when re-initialization of the re-writable information storage medium is required, the drive system determines defect possibilities of blocks in recordable areas of the entire medium, or defect blocks registered in the defect information, through verification after recording.
The recording of the defect blocks that are registered in the defect information or in the entire medium, and then determining whether the blocks are defective through disc verification when re-initializing the re-writable information storage medium, can be inconvenient for users because it takes too much time to re-initialize the medium.